Labyrinhts (1962) - Jorge Luis Borges POLL

Lem's got a critique of American sf in the same book. Basically his beef is that the genre opens up all sorts of possibilities but writers can't really hack it, they suffer from a kind of anxiety of choice and fall back on basic tropes borrowed from other genres such as the detective story and the fairy tale. Which is a fair enough criticism but neglects the idea that if one embraces this alleged deficiency there is a way in which the stuff becomes more aesthetically interesting. The common underlying motif is that other writers can't live up to the bold promises they come up with, they have to fall back on safety nets embroidered with interesting patterns. He alone can extrapolate without a net, without losing his logic, lucid clarity all the while hinting at an alien otherness of which he is not fool enough to follow the temptation of clomping foot of world-building nerdism to kill with over-explanation.

Basically Lem is one of those lovable Mandarins like Nabokov, you have to take his dislikes with a grain of salt.

love that Lem book. love most Lem books really.

Have gotten more than one screen name from this book.

You guys know that "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" was made into a movie, The Spider's Stratagem, by Bertolucci. Worth seeing.

I did not know that. Am definitely going to check it out, thanks.

I saw it years ago; it was always available on VHS. Is it out on DVD?

Dunno

http://bit.ly/1itztm9

saw it years back - not my favourite Borges tbh, and since i don't remember much of it i'm guessing it's not my favourite Bertolucci either

sure it's worth seeing again tho - didn't mean to be sniffy

Gonna be either Garden of Forking Paths or Library of Babel

I read this book by a mathematician exploring the concepts raised in Babel which deepened my appreciation of it. Gets a bit heady at times but it was very approachable, definitely recommend it. For example iirc one of his conclusions was that the Library as described would be larger than the observable universe itself.

http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Library-Babel/dp/0195334574

I've come across that book before--can't remember whether I ended up reading any or not. Both "Library" and "Garden" seem interesting primarily in an information-theory context--what constitutes a message, how much metadata is required to distinguish it from background noise...

One of *my* conclusions about the Library, back when I was younger & had days to spend idly pondering these sorts of things, was that its exhaustion of language corresponds to the regeneration of a second-level language, whose 'characters' would be the individual 410-page volumes of the library, arranged in combinations to form A la recherche du temps perdu, or the King James Bible, or any other work that exceeds 410 pages in length. Theoretically, there's no reason we couldn't use this new protocol to produce an episodic narrative work of indefinite length; but if we tried to draw it out too long, we would eventually be forced to repeat entire 'books' from earlier in the narrative.

... anyway, I got somewhat distracted from my original reason for clicking this thread, which was to renew my praise of "There Are More Things", a tragically unappreciated late Borges story that knocks the stuffing out of Danielewski's House of Leaves

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

just re-read the Lem piece, as a takedown (or at least, a delineation of Borges' failings) it's pretty cogent

In general agree, but think "failings" is too harsh a word, its more like a motif or trope or something. It's like saying it is a failing for Piet Mondrian to paint little colored rectangles or Hitchcock to use doubled characters.

whatta maroon, paint some circles already

lol

yeah failings is kind of harsh... limitations, maybe?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Everything that got a zero was robbed. Everything that got a one too.

Feel like you get more insight, or aperçus, as Xgau used to call them, from a negative Lem writeup than from someone else's praise.

'nh' typo in thread title makes me think it is some kind of Portuguese word.

"The Immortal" is the only zero-vote-getter I would really miss if it were gone

http://i.imgur.com/ETLr6SV.jpg

On his partner/literary executor:

https://www.thedial.world/issue-7/jorge-luis-borges-legacy-maria-kodama

Haven't checked your link yet, but title reminds me of some discussion on another good old thread: Borges translation?